Another week, another edition of Whewell’s Gazette the weekly #histSTM links list bringing to its readers all of the histories of science, technology and medicine that could be swept together out of the depths of cyberspace.

Last Tuesday saw the return of the yearly celebration of women in STEM, Ada Lovelace Day. It is a sad reflection that in the twenty-first century we still need to make people aware of the fact that women are not treated equally in the STEM disciplines, despite the many proofs delivered by numerous women in the twentieth century that they are in every way the equal to their male colleagues.

As usually the Internet #histSTM community was well represented on this day with some new posts and articles and the reposting of some old ones and as usual in what could almost said to be a tradition we have collected together as many of these posts and articles as we could find and present them here for your perusal.

It is to be hoped at some not all to distant point in the future that the necessity for an Ada Lovelace Day will have become superfluous, unfortunately it doesn’t look as though this will be the case anytime soon. Until it is Whewell’s Gazette will continue to support and encourage those who valiantly strive to raise the awareness of the role that women have played in #histSTM

To illustrate the challenges of sending robotic missions to Mars,Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, showed this chart of the history of Mars missions during a March 31 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council. The chart — part of a presentation Gerst gave on NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars in the 2030s — “shows how difficult Mars really is, if you look at the number of failures.” Credit: NASA

An advertisement for Primodos in The Practitioner from the early 1960s marketing campaign aimed at GPs that aggressively targeted the slower, more expensive toad test Photograph: Practitioner, vol 187 July 1961/The Practitioner, Practitioner Medical Publishing Ltd